You have come to the right place, and we are glad you are here. This is a safe place to share stories of love and loss, devastating grief, exhausting care-giving, memorials, advanced directives, mourning, hope, and despair. We want to hear about about what you wish you had known or done differently, what you wish those around you had known or done differently, and what went right. We will never tell you to move on or find closure.
"What cannot be said will be wept." Sappho

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Sensuous Aesthetic Gratification: Making Final Moments Comfortable and Meaningful

"With some real attention to the design of palliative care and hospitals, we can totally transform what the process of dying becomes for people. Instead of a gruesome, clinical, scary process, it can be, by design, a concentrated crescendo of all the things it means to be living, packed into those final months and days.

Think about it: At a time when a person is struggling with the biggest hurdle of their lives — leaving their lives behind and not existing corporeally anymore — they are often completely cut off from the humanity and experience of life they so desperately are wishing to exercise while they fleetingly still can.

Like feeling their dog lying at the foot of their bed with a cold nose against them. The feelings and quick snapshots in time that, strung together, make up a life.

BJ calls this "sensuous aesthetic gratification," putting words to those moments where we're tactilely rewarded just for being alive.

He makes a moving case for why the entire process of dying should be comprised of more moments of pure living.
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About Me

This is a place to share stories of the end of life: care-giving, grief, loss, palliative care, legal and medical paperwork, living wills, funerals and memorials, condolence, bereavement, isolation, comfort, and hope. By sharing our stories, we learn, we grow, we make things better.